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The Southern Claims Commission in Virginia

The Southern Claims Commission was created by Congress on March 3,
1871, to compensate southern Unionists for property appropriated by the Union army during the American Civil War (1861–1865).
Although claims for reimbursement had been made since early in the war, many in
Congress had resisted authorizing their payment. They feared fraud and dismissed the
sincerity of Unionism in the South. Once former Confederate states began to be
readmitted to the Union, however, pressure mounted and the law passed. The act
required the president to appoint three commissioners to "receive, examine, and
consider the justice and validity" of claims for "stores and supplies"
taken by the Union army in the Confederate states. The commissioners reported their
decisions on each claim to Congress for approval and appropriation. Because the Union
presence was so extensive in the state, Virginians submitted 3,197 claims, the second
largest number after Tennessee. The claims from Virginia suggest the wide diversity
of Unionism in the state during the war. White men often expressed their loyalty by
opposing secession, while African Americans sought freedom from slavery and women worked within their traditional gender roles to
assist the Union war effort. Over time, the Southern Claims Commission lost support
and was seen as divisive. It finished its work in 1880. MORE...

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Wartime Foraging

During the Civil War, Union armies often foraged for food and supplies, meaning that
soldiers appropriated what they needed from people living nearby. Unreliable supply
routes by railroad and water encouraged such practices first in the Western Theater
and then in Virginia. What started as an informal necessity turned into a tactic of war. On July 18, 1862, for instance, Union general John Pope, commander of the new Army of Virginia, issued
General Orders No. 5, which directed his men to "subsist upon the country."
Two years later, the Union general-in-chief, Ulysses S. Grant, ordered his commander in the Shenandoah
Valley to have his soldiers "eat out Virginia clear and clean as far as they
go, so that crows flying over it for the balance of this season will have to carry
their provender with them." Cavalry under Philip H. Sheridan largely complied later that
year.

Union soldiers could clean out a family in a matter of days. Kate Couse, of Spotsylvania County, in
testimony before the Southern Claims Commission after the war, described the
"desolation" left by the Union army in May 1864. "Everything we had
was swept out in one week," she said, "and we were left with very little to
eat, and what little we had, we divided with some wounded Union soldiers left at a
neighbor's house unprovided for." After the soldiers had moved on, she
continued, "we walked over the cleared part of our farm, and there was scarcely
a thing of any value remaining in the place but the buildings. All was
desolation." Her husband Peter Couse's claim was approved in 1875.

Even some Virginians who otherwise sympathized with the Union protested these kinds
of appropriations. William Peters was a free black man in Rockingham County
during the war. As part of making a successful claim in 1876, he recalled complaining
to Union soldiers that "it was mighty hard to take the property of a negro, that
I was not against [them]. They said they had to have horses and forage to carry on
the war and I could do without better than they could." In some instances Union
officers left receipts promising compensation to loyal southerners, but more often
they left only empty storehouses and stripped fields.

Debate over Claims

Even without promises of compensation, southerners lobbied the U.S. government for
payment. As early as 1862, William Reid requested reimbursement from the federal
government for wood, stock, and produce taken from his Fairfax County farm. Reid wrote that he expected the
government would "promptly provide necessary means to remunerate him for the
injuries he has suffered, by the acts of its army." His efforts, however, were
in vain. Although laws authorizing such remuneration were proposed in Congress, and
although residents of Loudoun and
Stafford counties were especially
active in petitioning for relief, the U.S. Congress passed a law on July 4, 1864, limiting the payment of such claims to residents of
non-Confederate states.

After the war, requests for remuneration continued to pour in. They were submitted to
various departments of the military and to the claims committees in Congress. Worried
that the cost of reimbursement would be too high, the House resolved on January 30, 1866, that its Committee of Claims reject all claims "by
citizens of any of the States lately in rebellion, growing out of the destruction or
appropriation of, or damage to, property by the Army or Navy while engaged in
suppressing the rebellion." Even claims from former slaves were considered
illegitimate.

Opponents of southern claims tended to dismiss the sincerity of Unionism in the
South. They argued that a law authorizing such claims would be used by former
Confederates to win reimbursement fraudulently. Or, like Senator John Sherman, a
Republican of Ohio, they claimed that southern Unionists amounted to no more than the
"indifferent, idle, or old, women and children." In other words, according
to Sherman, these potential claimants were people who were unlikely to have owned
property that could have been seized in the first place. Some went further and
suggested that the ranks of Unionists consisted primarily of those who had refused to
do their duty by fighting
for the Confederacy. Still others asked why, if they truly had been loyal, had Unionists remained
in places such as Virginia during the war.

The tide only turned in favor of considering southern claims when former Confederate
states began to be readmitted to the Union. Their representatives, and especially
southern and border-state Republicans, supported claims as a matter of justice for
their constituents. Democrats north and south, meanwhile, argued that such a law would promote
reconciliation. Senator Waitman T.
Willey, a Republican of West
Virginia, referred to Unionists when he said, "I think it would be
exceedingly hard to reject the applications of such men, and to say that they are no
better than the rebels among whom they lived." He suggested that while former
Confederates now "lived in the perfect enjoyment of every civil right of the
American citizen," those Unionists who had suffered for their beliefs were
"regarded as public enemies, not entitled to the benefit and protection of … the
Constitution."

Only some northern and western Republicans continued to oppose southern claims, but
their concerns did not carry the day. On March 3, 1871, Congress established the
Southern Claims Commission.

Structure of the Commission

The law created an independent, three-member commission. It could hear claims only
from "those citizens who remained loyal adherents to the cause and the
Government of the United States during the war," although Congress did not
provide the commissioners with a definition of such loyalty. The law also limited
consideration to claims for quartermaster and commissary supplies. Finally, all
decisions by the commission were subject to congressional approval.

With these parameters in place, lawmakers left it up to the commission's three
presidentially appointed members—Asa Owen Aldis, of Vermont (president); Orange
Ferriss, of New York; and James B. Howell, of Iowa—to create the rules by which they
would hear and decide on claims. They adopted fairly rigorous standards of operation,
largely as a means of preventing fraudulent claims from former Confederates. To win
an award, for instance, claimants were required to prove two points: first, that they
had been loyal to the Union for the entire length of the war, and second, that their
property had been appropriated by proper military authorities. The commissioners
defined residency in a Confederate state during the war as "prima facie evidence of disloyalty" and required all claimants to prove
otherwise. They also interpreted the law to limit compensation to medical,
engineering, and food supplies. Claims for damage to buildings would be barred. The
commission's strict approach disappointed many who had hoped to compensate
southerners for a wider variety of claims, and it frustrated those who had favored
more lenient definitions of loyalty.

All claims generally required witness corroboration. For claims of more than $10,000,
the commissioners favored in-person testimony, while for claims of less than $10,000,
they designed a set of questions, called "Standing Interrogatories," to be put to claimants and witnesses. Questions about military
service, financial holdings, business dealings, and personal relationships were
designed to elicit a detailed picture of a person's experiences and loyalties
during the war. The commissioners appointed local men throughout the South to
distribute these interrogatories and hear testimony, with the resulting depositions
being forwarded to Washington, D.C. From there, the commissioners could order further
investigation and, on occasion, even travel to interview claimants personally. They
required that any decision to approve a claim be unanimous. And at the end of every
year they submitted all approved claims to the House of Representatives, which rarely
overturned a decision.

Claims from Virginia

From 1871 to 1880, southerners submitted 22,298 claims. Because many were not
accompanied by any evidence (i.e., oral testimony or the completion of the
interrogatories), only 16,995 claims were officially considered. Of these, 7,409, or
about 44 percent, were approved for a total of $4,636,920.69. Virginia ranked behind
only Tennessee in the total number of claims, at 3,197.

When the commissioners composed their first set of interrogatories, they seemed to be
guided by a rather narrow vision of southern Unionists: those who had opposed
secession both at the ballot box and on the battlefield. But when they first began to
hear testimony, the commissioners found themselves confronted with many southerners
who did not fit this model, including many white men but also white women and African
Americans. The commissioners likely had not imagined white female southerners or
black southerners as loyal citizens or, for that matter, expected them to have owned
much property. However, many white women had inherited property from their fathers or
their husbands, and many former slaves had accumulated property by hiring themselves
out or by working for themselves after hours.

As such, the records of the Southern Claims Commission reveal many different kinds of
Unionists and a variety of ways in which Virginians, in particular, expressed their
understandings of loyalty. White claimants, for instance, generally presented
themselves as anti-secessionist. David W. Landis, of Augusta County, testifying as part of a successful
claim in 1879, asserted, "I never believed in the doctrine of secession, nor in
the Virginia doctrine that it was my duty to go with any State. I believed that my
first allegiance was due to the National Government." Others, especially those
who had not owned slaves, emphasized class distinctions. Simeon B. Shaw, a Culpeper County farmer whose
claim was approved in 1878, suggested that his loyalty was directly related to his
status as a "poor man." The Confederates, he argued, had waged war "in
the interest of slavery." Without slave property to defend, "I regarded the
war as altogether wrong and unnecessary." Moreover, Shaw feared that "If
the South had gained their independence, a poor man like [me] would stand no chance
at all here."

Black Virginians usually equated the Union cause with emancipation. Ephraim Wynn, who had been a slave in Dinwiddie County, explained, "I was always a
Union man. I was a slave & I thought my only chance for freedom was in the
success of the Union cause." (His claim was approved in 1879.) Mary Blackburn,
of Augusta County, had been a slave when her husband succeeded in purchasing her
freedom just before the outbreak of the war. Her husband had not, however, been able
to free her children, "all of them sold to traders whilst I was in slavery. I
have never heard from them since." As part of a claim approved in 1875, she
explained to the commissioners that she had supported the Union cause "because
of the manner in which my children were torn from me." Free blacks also nearly
universally supported the Union cause. William James, of Henrico County, reported, "I believed that if the Rebels gained their independence they would
make slaves of all of us free colored people. I could'nt [sic] get my rights from any body but the Union." (His claim was
approved.)

While the commissioners generally looked favorably upon such expressions of Union
sentiments, they placed greater weight on evidence that claimants had actually
contributed to the Union cause. They especially valued political and military service
to the Union. Joseph Eggleston Segar,
of Elizabeth City County,
recounted his political efforts in opposition to secession. As a long-serving member
of the General Assembly, he had voted against several disunion measures prior to the
Civil War. He highlighted his attempts, in the spring of 1861, to prevent the
state's seizure of guns at Bellona Arsenal, near Richmond, that the federal government planned to transfer to Fort Monroe. Even before it had seceded, Virginia was
preparing itself for war, a move that Segar opposed. Along with several other
Unionist delegates, he left the chamber to break up a quorum and so prevent a vote on
the authorizing bill "as the only means of defeating the infamous measure."
He succeeded in evading the sergeant at arms sent to round up legislators, but the
measure passed anyway. His petition for reimbursement was approved in 1874. Another
claimant, Lorenzo Thomas Jr., provided details of his service as a Union officer in
order to claim property appropriated in Alexandria County. Thomas's father, an
adjutant general, had initially requested his son's commission from Abraham Lincoln's first
secretary of war, Simon Cameron.

Virginians who, because of their subordinate social positions, were not able to cite
political acts or military service instead emphasized their contributions to the
Union armies. Edward W. Whitehurst, a former slave from Elizabeth City County, had worked as a nurse
in Union hospitals at Newport
News and Fort Monroe before opening a bake house in Hampton. His claim was approved in 1877. Pamunkey Indians, who retained
a small reservation in King
William County, had contributed between ten and fourteen men to Union
service out of a village of about twenty-five households. Lambert C. Page, for
instance, testified that he had served as "a pilot for Genl. McClellan's
boats on the Pamunkey River" after the Seven Days' Battles in 1862.

In accordance with traditional gender roles, white women often repudiated the public
world of politics as beyond the private realm of domesticity. Eliza A. Clarke, of
Roanoke County, whose claim
was rejected in 1872, stressed her opposition to secession and support for the Union.
But "as a woman," she explained, "I took no part whatever in the
war." She explained that "I never did anything to help the Confederate
cause or hurt the Union," and that "I would have been willing to contribute
to the success of the Union so far as my means and circumstances would permit."
Mary Kane, of Caroline County,
won approval of her claim in 1877 after describing how she helped Union soldiers by
warning them of the imminent arrival of a Confederate detachment and by sending her
son to guide them to safety.

The commissioners accepted that some loyal southerners had been prevented from
contributing to the Union war effort by Confederate repression. Robert Butler, of
Fauquier County, whose
claim was approved in 1876, testified he had experienced ongoing harassment by
Confederates throughout the war, including having his house set on fire as a result
of his loyalties to the Union. He had been forced to "lie out" in the woods
to escape conscription. Black Virginians especially had confronted the dangers of
Confederate persecution. William Pugh, of Norfolk County, told the commissioners that "I
was taken in 1861 from my farm and carried to a hill side adjoining and struck six or
seven times with a club with a gun held pointed at me. Done by Confederate cavalrymen
for having been reported as carrying information to the Union forces." His claim
was approved in 1871.

Many black Virginians suffered impressment, which allowed the Confederate government to legally seize
food, fuel, slaves, and other commodities in support of the war effort. Their
treatment by authorities was often brutal. Benjamin Summers, of Norfolk County, related that "I was taken handcuffed and carried to Craney Island and made to
work on the earth works with ball and chain on my legs. I was kept there two months,
when my legs were so bad from the chain that I was sent back to Suffolk. This was by
the Confederate authorities and because I did not want to go and tried to get away. I
was given five hundred lashes and then rubbed down with salt brine." The local
commissioner recording his testimony described his injuries: "Claimant has shown
me a fearful looking body where he has been whipped. His hips looking as though large
pieces of flesh had been dug out." His claim was approved in 1879.

Still, most claimants failed to win compensation for their appropriated property.
Patterson Allen (sometimes Allan), of Goochland County, could not prove his loyalty to
the commissioners' satisfaction. He had voted for Unionist delegates to the Convention of 1861 and had
refused to vote for secession in the statewide referendum that spring. Because he had
furnished a substitute and secured a service exemption, he was not directly
implicated in the Confederate military. His evidence of loyalty, however, largely
rested on his wartime efforts to secure the release of his wife, who had been
imprisoned on charges of serving as a Union spy. In 1871, the commissioners
disallowed his claim on circumstantial evidence. In the course of arranging for his
wife's protection, he had been granted passes to enter and leave Richmond, which
indicated that "the confederate authorities had the strongest assurances that he
was at least not unfriendly to the government." The commissioners considered
Allen's wife loyal, but because she had not owned the property in question they
rejected the claim.

Allen could not rely upon his wife's loyalty to prove his own, but many white
female claimants supported their claims with evidence of their husbands' loyalty
or found their claims rejected on account of their husbands' disloyalty. While
most black claimants successfully proved their loyalty, they often failed the second
hurdle to a successful claim: the property test. In other words, they were unable to
convince the commissioners that they were industrious enough to have earned the
property they claimed had been seized.

End of the Commission

The Southern Claims Commission faced increasing opposition over the course of its ten
years of operation. Former Confederates condemned claimants as nothing more than
traitors. As for "southern claims," the Richmond Daily
Dispatch sneered, "the southernpeople have nothing to do with them, and care nothing about
them." The newspaper asserted that "the claims of such persons," that
is, loyal citizens, "are such as the southern people are
utterly indifferent about." Indeed, payment would only go to those who
"cannot honestly be called southern people."
Southern politicians called for the abolition of the commission or opening it to
claims from former Confederates. In 1873 Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, a Democrat from Virginia,
argued that the federal government ought to reimburse former owners for the loss of
their freed slaves. Republicans responded by warning of "rebel raids" on the federal treasury, and
in 1876 they reported that Democrats were threatening to pay claims to former Confederates if they
won the presidency that autumn.

Democrats won control of Congress in 1878, and although they were not united enough
to end the commission, they did refuse to appropriate salaries to the commissioners
and their investigators and clerks. Fatigue with Reconstruction policies had long set
in, and many of the original arguments against claims were resurrected by northern
and western Republicans. In Thomas Nast's popular editorial cartoons, which
appeared in Harper's Weekly, the phrase "southern
claims" came to signify defrauding the government, while the New York Times, in 1879, complained that "the men who now claim to have been loyal" were once
"the skulkers and the sneaks." "Why," the paper asked, "should
the sincere rebels of the South wish to see the country—themselves as well as the
people of the North—taxed to put money in these men's purses?"

At the end of the Civil War, distinctions between loyal and disloyal citizens had
served a political purpose, with many believing that the former would make better
citizens. By the 1870s, however, this argument no longer prevailed. In order to do
their jobs, commissioners were required to focus on the divisive details of wartime
loyalties, which, some argued, prevented the reconciliation of white southerners and
white northerners. Even many Republicans came to see Unionists and their attempts at
reimbursement as impeding the establishment of workable, republican governments in
the South.

The Southern Claims Commission finished its work in March 1880, and the end came just
in time. The political will to sustain the continued payment of claims had nearly
disappeared.

Time Line

July 18, 1862
- Union general John Pope issues General Orders No. 5, directing the Army of Virginia to "subsist upon the country." His General Orders No. 7 hold Confederate civilians who live near the sites of guerrilla attacks responsible for damages. Confederates perceive these orders to be violations of the tradition of honorable warfare.

July 4, 1864
- The U.S. Congress passes a law limiting the payment of claims for compensation for the destruction of Union armies to residents of non-Confederate states.

July 14, 1864
- Via a letter to Henry W. Halleck, Union general Ulysses S. Grant orders General David Hunter to lay waste to the Shenandoah Valley.

January 30, 1866
- The U.S. House of Representatives resolves that its Committee of Claims reject all claims for compensation for the destruction of Union armies originating in former Confederate states.

March 3, 1871
- The U.S. Congress passes a law establishing the Southern Claims Commission, an independent body charged with hearing claims of southern Unionists for compensation for the destruction of Union armies during the Civil War.

1873
- Senator Robert M. T. Hunter, a Democrat of Virginia, argues that the federal government ought to reimburse former owners for the loss of their freed slaves.

Autumn 1876
- Democrats reportedly threaten to pay large claims to former Confederates for damage done by Union armies during the Civil War if they win the presidential election.